Does the bag-of-visual-words method improve the classification accuracy?
Bag-of-visual words (BOVW) was classicly used in computer vision before the introduction of neural networks or some more advanced classical techniques, such us VLAD or Fisher Vectors. In any case, it is a good technique to use, but it is not the state-of-the-art today, and I won't recommend you use it for a real-life project.